You need to figure out where the water is coming from (no gutters on roof, saturated soil, lot runoff, etc) and address that first.

This gives a healthy margin plus or minus the 1% since these are nominally median values and come from zillow (so taken with a large grain of salt).Finally, I personally have no desire to deal with rentals where it snows, so I filtered this mainly to the south (I left in the west, but nothing showed up and no offense to El Paso but it didn't just fit on the map).Metro and zip codes:Greensboro-High Point [27265]Raleigh [27610]Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia [28083, 28214]Columbia [29073, 29209, 29229]Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Roswell [30014, 30058, 30088, 30134, 30135, 30180, 30213, 30228, 30248, 30253, 30273, 30294, 30296]Birmingham-Hoover [35040, 35235]Memphis [38018, 38125, 38637, 38671]Louisville/Jefferson County [40272] Baton Rouge [70726] Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington [75040, 75043, 75060, 75104, 75115, 75126, 75134, 75137, 75146, 75154, 75217, 75227, 75241, 76002, 76018, 76036, 76123, 76133, 76134, 76135, 76140, 76148, 76179]Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land [77045, 77047, 77083, 77084, 77086, 77088, 77089, 77303, 77346, 77373, 77388, 77396, 77449, 77489, 77493, 77521, 77545]San Antonio-New Braunfels [78109, 78223, 78233, 78252] El Paso [79924, 79936]

@Sandy Sandy  Is it possible to rent it now without rehab?

These are usually small 3/2 houses (1300 square feet heated or less) and the soil is sandy.I called a septic company but they said they would need to come out and see the house to give an estimate, but I am really just looking for a rough way to estimate this when deciding to make an offer or not.

Worst case is a dog chews up all the baseboard and window sills, scratches all the doors, tears down all the blinds, tears up or soils all the carpet, and tears up the yard.

Also parking by the ferry is not a great situation, also it is a very potential hazardous flood zone as we saw with Hurricane Sandy.

Put more eloquently, the Alabama Supreme Court said, “Though ordinarily there exists a presumption that one does not intend to abandon his property, this presumption is not attendant where the article claimed to have been abandoned is generally considered valueless.”[1] Photographic evidence that the contents of a tax sale property were all damaged, heavily soiled, or not worth the cost to haul to the dump, would seem to indicate “valueless” abandoned property.

as for investing in Texas i think the biggest thing that buy and hold investors miss is the property tax situation and the shock when the property is reassessed and your postiive cash flow just went negative.. then the other issue is foundation and soil  wind and hail.. 

You might want to add a bit of top soil to those areas.

You will want to hire a civil engineer to assess the drainage and a geotechnical engineer to sample the soil stability.